December 18, 2008
Dear Clusterflock
Do you write or receive handwritten letters on a regular basis?
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comments:
- Aaron Winslow: I’m the horse. Everything else is everything else.
- Deron Bauman: Oh, yeah. Poop is the tits.
- Michael Smith: For some reason I don’t find dog poop on the carpet as repulsive as cat urine, anywhere.
- Rick Neece: Poop is better than pee, well, unless it’s loose. I’m sorry to admit I chuckled.
- Joel Bernstein: That’s pretty much when our cats get put to sleep.
- Deron Bauman: Franklin’s been pooping wherever and whenever lately. The other day, I let him in and he promptly...
- Rick Neece: So far as I know, he hasn’t gone on the carpet. It isn’t fuzzy. If he starts, I don’t...
- Rick Neece: We don’t have fuzzy rugs in the bathrooms no more. Some mornings, the tile is cold, but it’s...
- Rick Neece: I generally can’t smell cat-pee, unless it’s freshey in the litterbox when I harvest the...
- Deron Bauman: It’s a start.
- Joel Bernstein: The first of many things, no doubt.
- Deron Bauman: I’ll pick him up at eight. He may not like the way I smell.
- Michael Smith: Joel’s Dream Date: Phantom Menace; Cat urine cologne; Deron.
- Joel Bernstein: For the record, if you pay to see this, you are no longer my friend.
- Deron Bauman: Meow.
No, but I wish I did.
No. Alas.
I write letters to a pilot friend from childhood. We’ve not seen each other in years or spoken on the phone or had any other communication than letters. He writes about places he flies to, and funny things that happen, and places he goes when he’s not flying.
I write sometimes to an artist friend in Chicago. He designs things and sends me amazing packages. He’s very fast, and I am very slow at responding.
I have always hated writing letters, but they are a joy to receive. Renner is the king of letter writers in this digital age.
Renner always sends handwritten thank-you notes, even in response to the goofiest little geegaw I might have given him.
Only when my friend Rachel is living overseas—which she does a lot, both luckily and unluckily for me. She uses e-mail a bit when she’s in the U.S., but more often she just calls.
I get a handwritten letter via e-mail from my friend Jack a couple of times a month. By which I mean, they have the heft and narrative arc of the best handwritten letters, but they happen to arrive electronically. I’m not picky.
Earlier this year my brilliant Internet friend Cindy and I tried to develop a paper-letter habit, but then I dropped the ball. Perhaps today I’ll pick it up again and lob it . . .
[...] my aforementioned friend [...]
Oh, and the excellent Elisabeth and I don’t exchange handwritten letters, exactly, but we do send care packages with notes in them. Really, who needs a letter when there’s marzipan involved?
I never quit the practice.
Writing by hand has always forced me to open doors into my native randomness. This is especially helpful to those outside my immediate family (bless them) who are already cursed with the ability to decipher my intent, if not language.
At least 3 different, 2 second ago professors claimed I could be a “singular literary lion” if I would but pen everything as I did my missives.
Uh huh.
Besides, I don’t always want to correct my mistakes, you know?
And so I also receive wonderful handwritten letters. The last one came from Bremerhaven and included a package with a hand-blown sunmill…
I should say, however, that I the few letters I have written have always been well received and returned in kind. There was an infamous twenty page letter I typed to a friend trying to sum up our personal mythologizes and narrow the focus to a singular philosophical problem using our common tongue (Eliot, Salinger, Onto-theology with all its Derridean critiques).
I miss doing that.